Still, there’s one caveat. While sales volume rose 63 percent, the number of transactions only rose 5 percent, meaning deal size played a huge role in the transaction numbers. So far, $18.5 billion of apartments sold this year. That’s almost double the volume of the first nine months of 2009, but the number of properties sold only represented a 31 percent increase.

“A lot of the assets that sold are of higher quality,” says Ben Thypin, senior market analyst at RCA. “That’s why the jump in volume is bigger than the jump in count.”

Ben Carlos Thypin

I am currently the co-founder of Quantierra, the world's first data driven real estate brokerage and investment manager. In my former life as Director of Market Analysis at Real Capital Analytics, I worked with press outlets large and small to provide them with great data and insightful commentary. Here are some of the results of this collaboration. For the rest, please check out the News Archive.